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The ongoing furore around Optus’s move to challenge the existing broadcasting paradigm with its audacious bid to replay almost-live sports coverage on mobiles was a high-profile example of technology capability outstripping current legal and business planning.

It has served as an appetiser to two other emerging wrangles involving giants of the internet and telecommunications industry, which highlight the growing reliance and importance of the internet in both conducting and promoting businesses.

Lawyers for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission yesterday started up a Federal Court attempt to overturn an earlier finding that search engine Google was blameless for misleading advertisements.

The case is based on apportioning blame for advertisements generated when users search for one brand, only to be linked to the website of a competitor. It is a tricky case to mount, given the obvious defence that when a search generates thousands of potential results, the website of a direct competitor is probably more relevant than most of the other links served up.

Nonetheless it is a thorny issue for companies that have invested in building their online brands, only to have that brand recognition hijacked by basic chicanery.

The affected companies feel strongly enough to have mounted legal representations, and that, at least forces the courts to make an assessment on a fast-evolving world that is becoming a nightmare to regulate.

One issue unlikely to see the inside of a court room is the result of last week’s Telstra network failure, which left millions of Telstra customers without access to the internet for about 45 minutes on Thursday afternoon.

Even when services were restored, customers continued to report connection problems and slow speeds into the evening. Woolworths has estimated the 45-minute outage cost it about $100,000 in lost online sales.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia was able to switch its trading platform onto the Optus network but lost all of its other internet services. Chief information officer Michael Harte said the bank’s telco contract meant it was able to pursue Telstra if it could prove loss of revenue but expressed doubts about whether it was likely to exercise its right. “Telstra and others help us when we are under [cyber] attack,” he said.

Although many thousands of businesses were affected, lawyers contacted by The Australian Financial Review thought it unlikely the outage would lead to a class action lawsuit.

“The terms and conditions are tightly bounded so the prospects of success are low,” Minter Ellison technology and communications partner Anthony Lloyd said. “Loss of profit or revenue is typically excluded from contracts so they are not recoverable. There may be some chance of compensation where a service level hasn’t been met.”

Mr Lloyd said big business would be looking for an explanation of what had happened and, more importantly, assurances it wouldn’t happen again. The outage would have been a particular concern for large, listed companies such as the banks because they have to answer to regulators as well as their customers.

Graham Phillips, a telecommunications partner with Herbert Geer, said there was little hope of financial compensation because service level agreements were heavily weighted in favour of the telcos.

Small businesses could be eligible for rebates under customer service guarantees, he said, although these typically required services to be out of action for more than a day. Even though compensation was unlikely, Mr Phillips said the outage was likely to be used as a bargaining tool when it was time to renegotiate telco contracts.

“There might be an expectation of greater service levels, where [connectivity] needs to be restored within a certain time and if it’s not then it relates to some sort of penalty,” he said.

“In those discussions a corporate might be more likely to hold its ground if there are real examples of them having suffered loss in the past.”

Business leaders will continue to view online strategies with concern for as long as online disputes continue to reside in the “too hard” legal basket, and it is difficult to see how that can change any time soon.